Bielsa splits the blue

Watching Marcelo Bielsa at his first press conference in Leeds was like watching the emotional thaw of an adopted dog being taken into a new home. For the first half hour there was no eye contact, barely a glance up from the table, where Bielsa had a sheaf of notes for a crutch and a translator to hide behind.

But by the end he was smiling, tongue out, tail wagging, his paw upon the shoulder of his new translating friend. Whether the great gang of journalists had asked easier questions than he expected, or he's always like this, or he was just glad it was over, is hard to say. But I wonder if the answer lies in Lille.

Lille and Leeds are twin cities, officially so for fifty years. Their universities were working together before the Second World War, negotiating difficult declines of their status as manufacturing giants of the industrial revolution. For Marcelo Bielsa, as he said on Monday, "Lille was the saddest moment of my career as a manager."

Bielsa was taken to Lille amid much fanfare and an annual salary of £8m, not just to coach the first team but to oversee a 'Lille Unlimited' project that would revolutionise the club. But Lille, perhaps to strengthen their links with Leeds, were on their sixth coach in four years, and the scale and speed of Bielsa's changes, and the distinct lack of results as Lille plunged to the bottom of Ligue 1, caused a rift with their sporting director, who had never wanted to hire Bielsa in the first place.

"My self-esteem as a manager, more than any time during my career, really suffered," said Bielsa on Monday, but not from the results: although he acknowledged that twelve points from thirteen games was enough to damage him. What hurt him was, "I only played 20 per cent of the games for the period which I was under contract."

Bielsa's volatile reputation, particularly in recent years, after leaving Marseille one match into his second season and walking out of Lazio two days after starting work, has largely been constructed on his terms; in both cases, his resignation was his own professional judgement of his ability to work under certain conditions. At Lille they sacked him, and his professional judgement was that he wasn't done. His last moments at Lille were caught on camera: sitting alone in a restaurant, gazing glumly into a laptop at a live stream as his team were defeated without him.

Apart from lecture tours, that was the last anyone had seen of Marcelo Bielsa. The taciturn and downcast fellow making his first halting statements as Leeds United manager could have been lifted straight from that Lille restaurant to Elland Road.